Film in Review

One thing I really like about the holidays is that I do manage to find a large chunk of uninterrupted time to accomplish a few things that need more than an hour here and there. It's not that I become a hermit or anything, in fact I think I set a new record on Christmas Eve by coming home at 7am from being out the night before. It's been a while since I've done that.

This weekend's project was to get my B&W film developing going again at my studio. I haven't developed any film in the two years that I've been here. And while some projects I've been taking to the lab to get processed, I had this big tumbler cup I've been throwing a lot of my exposed film into, with the idea that one day I would get around to developing it.

You see, when I shoot, I don't just shoot digitally. I usually grab some film and shoot with my film cameras as well. Not as much as digital for a number of reasons, but if I really like what we're doing, I like to capture some of it on film as well. Different look. Different feel. I still love film.

So these rolls had become a bit of a mystery. I hadn't labeled any of them. I wasn't even sure what shoots they were from. So I mixed my chemicals and began to develop them, two rolls at a time.

It was like a little year in review for me. Like I said, I'd been having a lab do most of my film processing work during the year, so every time I unspooled a roll out of the tanks to dry it was like, "Oh yeah! I forgot about that!"

Lots of great stuff with Melissa, Frances, Morgan and Jillian. Well at least it looks great holding the negatives up to the light. I'll have to scan them over the next few days and see what I have, but I've gotten pretty good over the years at being able to look at a negative and know what the positive prints will look like.

Someone asked me on Saturday whether I thought 2006 was a good year or not for me. I thought for a minute. Only because a lot has happened this year. I think there were times this year when I would have said it was the worst year of my life. But sitting here today at the very end of 2006, I think I would have to say that it ended up being a very good year.

And it's not just because of the old "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" adage. I think it's because I had to grow a lot this year. I learned a lot. It was hard, but I think on the other side of it all, I would say it was worth it. In fact I think any time I stop learning about myself, it's easy to lose sight of what the important things in life are.

I learned a lot about my art. How I do it. Why I do it. Different ways to do it. Why it's important to know that it's a collaboration, but ultimately, it's got to be my vision or the image won't be everything it can be. I'm lucky to have found people that I work with that understand that. We continue to make beautiful inspiring images because... well... art is the most important thing to me.

My life is much less when I'm not creating things that inspire me.

But one of the things that made 2006 a year I'll never forget is that it really became clear to me how beautifully wonderful my friends are. I wouldn't say I had been taking them for granted, but I forgot how wonderful it is to just spend time together with them. Not at a fancy dinner or a club or anything like that. But just being together. Talking and listening. Laughing. Crying. Smiling.

In that regard it's been a very humbling year for me. Sometimes it easy to forget that what we think we need isn't really what we really want. I know it's something I was reminded of this year. I'm incredible fortunate to have people like that in my life. We take turns giving and taking. The balance of life and friendship.

In the end, yes, 2006 was a good year. I'm looking forward to taking these experiences and moving into 2007.

Cheers and Merry New Year.

Je Retournerai.

Aujourd'hui j'ai commencé pour rechercher quelque chose que j'ai donnée loin. Quelque chose je n'ai eu aucun droit de donner. C'était un morceau de moi.

Il ne sera pas facile de rechercher, mais je réussirai.

Je reviendrai à Paris un jour. La ville que j'ai aimée et j'aimerai encore. Je marcherai les belles rues cette fois par moi. Seulement. Cette fois avec seulement les bons fantômes des artistes de camarade par mon côté.

Je retournerai.

Back to Chicago

Ryan drove me to LAX this afternoon to catch my flight back to Chicago. Always nice to get a ride to the airport. I always find the ride back to be interesting. You pass all the same things you passed on the way into the city, but I most often see things with slightly different eyes than when I saw them the first time.

Oil derricks on La Cieniga. Inflatable Santas on motorcycles on Crescent Heights. Giant snow globes on green lawns. Blue sky. The bluest. And the palm trees reaching up into that blue.

It does however, remain completely off to hear the drone of christmas musak in 80 degrees under bright sun.

Traveling is always a time to grow for me. It doesn't matter where I'm going or how long I'm staying there. I always look at it as an opportunity to reset everything. New bed. New morning routine. When I step out the front door, it's different from my own. Doing nothing during the day exactly the way I would at home.

You really can't help but think about things you take for granted during your every day life.

photo by Ryan Hughes
I won't get into the personal details here. But I learned a lot about myself on this trip. I've been simplifying a lot in the last few months. It's been good for me. Ryan and I have been through so much in the years we've known each other. I really feel fortunate to spend time with such a friend who knows me like she does. She's good at keeping me honest about myself. She challenges me in the best way.

While I was here in LA, as the days went by, I was able to see a few things differently than I have been for the last few months. Some things I saw happening in other people's lives taught me about things in my life and how I have been reacting to them. It's that clarity that I get when I travel. It's an amazing thing.

I looked through my viewfinder and took many different kinds of photographs than I have the past year. Working with what I had rather than trying to create what I didn't.

I look at what Ryan's done with her life in the last year, big important changes, and I wonder if I need more in mine. Certainly in my head I'm making adjustments, but I've lived in Chicago my whole life, traveling the world, but always coming back.

Maybe it's time to go somewhere and stay there.

There are many places I've lived for a brief time. Other languages. Other customs and ways of doing things. Perhaps I have lived in these places too brief a time.

I've been letting go of the idea of need. Things I thought I needed. Things I thought made me happy. Like anything we become attached to, we spend so much time trying to hold on, that we start to lose perspective on who we are and this quest for happiness. I'm not saying I don't want to be happy, but I think that over the years, it's easy to build up a list of things I think I need to be happy, when many of those things can actually create unhappiness if I'm not careful.

Detach. Let go. Breathe. Create.

Flight crews, please prepare for takeoff.

Los Angeles part 3

Overheard bits of conversation walking around LA today...

"...with that boa, he looks like a french whore and he smells like a french whore..."

"...I just fucking hate him..."

I want to write a book sometime that is just bits of conversation I hear as I'm walking by people on the sidewalk. But there's clearly a lot of material here.

Ryan and I have been hiking up in Runyon Canyon for the last two days. It's been about 12 years since I hiked up there. It's changed a lot. There are fancy gates at the entrance now and a new steeper path that gets you up to the top faster, but it gets your heart racing. It's been fun.

We window shopped on Melrose. Always fun to see the displays.

We've been sampling cocktails here and there. We stopped at Hamburger Mary's on Santa Monica tonight. It was Drag Queen Bingo Night there. Wildberry mohitos seemed to be the appropriate drink and we enjoyed two there. They also have a great bathroom with a disco ball and a boom box that just plays Dancing Queen over and over on a loop.

Last night her friends at Ruth's Chris in Beverly Hills set us up with a fabulous meal like I haven't had in a long time. Great people watching there as well.

But we've mostly been spending a lot of time walking and talking. It's been great. Talking about good things and bad, but just perfect with a good friend. That's what life is about. I feel very good after a few days here.

Tomorrow I'm heading home. Back to the winter gray of Chicago. But my head has a nice fresh coat on it from the sun here, and it's been nice to sip drinks in outdoor patios. I'll go into the long winter with my batteries fully recharged.

Thanks Ryan.

Los Angeles part 2

Once again, there is something about traveling... the constant state of unfamiliarity... senses straining to soak in everything that is new... nothing taken for granted... nothing that is been there, done that.

I does me good to be in this state.

I've only been on this trip for two days and already I feel a sense of clarity of purpose that I haven't felt in some time.

I do feel like I've been asleep for a long time and I'm waking up again.

Of course the surreal effect of walking down Sunset Boulevard without even so much as a jacket while chainsaws trimmed the stumps off christmas trees for sale in a huge lot was a bit out of context. That distinctive smell of freshly cut pine, while my eyes were sending my brain images of palm trees and people in shorts was... well... odd.

A guy dressed in what must have been a very warm Santa suit holding a big sign outside a store that read Get Nintendo Wii Here! (Only $700.)

Dozens of mid-life crisises roaring past in their convertible top Z4s.

A probably seldom noticed Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio, still quietly sitting across the street from the Beverly Hills city limits, blending into it's modest corner lot in such a artistically beautiful way.

The pinks and purples of an early evening sky that never hides itself with dense gray cloud cover.

Los Angeles is one of those cities that I always thought could eat you alive if you arrived here looking to find yourself externally rather than internally. It's a city that never says no, yet you can grow old waiting for yes.

Yet in the midst of all of this, I've met people I know will be friends in the future. I've spent a lot of time talking and listening about where we all are heading. It's a bit of a puzzle sometimes. Critical pieces can be seemingly elusive if we force it or look too hard where we won't find it.

Weeks before I arrived here, I began learning meditation. It's been difficult to turn off the static of conscious thought and drift into another place. But I'm getting better at it. My heightened travel state of awareness has actually helped take me to a place where I can be at peace with some of my fears and pains.

I'm leaning to separate who I am from attachments that I had grown to rely on. Attachments that in all honesty were starting to make me forget what I loved about being me. It's hard to go back and collect what I had no right to give away in the first place. Not material things, but pieces of me that aren't really mine to give away if I'm to be a whole person.

So yeah, I'm finding this trip and seeing my great friend Ryan has been a nice tune-up for me. She's been one of several good friends of mine who continues to see things in and about me that I manage to bury in myself. She's taught me a lot of about seeing myself as others see me - in a very good way.

She's always seen the beauty in me and the art I create long before I manage to notice it myself.

So I'm looking forward to the next few days here. Finding an ironic sense of inner peace in a city that is so much about the external. Wading through the happiness that is all around us, but invisible, like radio waves. I'm learning to tune into that again.

Los Angeles

I'm writing from Los Angeles today. My friend Ryan picked me up from LAX a few hours ago and as we drove back to her neighborhood in West Hollywood I was finding it a little difficult trying to get my bearings. I realized of all my homes away from home, places I feel really comfortable and know my way around in, LA has slipped below both New York and San Francisco. There was a time when I knew LA like the back of my hand. New York is getting to be like that for me now, but since it's been so many years since I spent any serious time in LA, I find myself having to relearn everything.

I used to zip back and forth between Westwood, Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, Hollywood and Burbank... well I guess in LA it's sometimes difficult to do any serious zipping... but it's been quite some time since I've done that. A few minutes on Google Maps though and I think I'm getting my footing back again.

It's been since May that I've gotten to see Ryan. Too long. We've been friends for seven years I think was the number she came up with this week and even though I've spent lots of time on the phone with her in LA traffic while I walked the streets of Chicago, it's not the same as in person contact. So I'm looking forward to spending time with her for a few days and getting to know her new life here.

And of course it goes without saying that December in LA is much nicer than December in Chicago. Walking around without a jacket on. That's all I'm going to say.

Some new things going on...

The opening first few weeks of the online Billy Sheahan Photography Store have been very busy. You can buy prints, get on the free email postcard mailing list, buy twelve months of physical postcards and other things as well. I'm very pleased with how that's been going. I think a lot of people are doing some of their Christmas shopping there. It's really been great.

In another exciting piece of news, I interviewed a very promising new model yesterday in Chicago. We have very similar photographic influences, so it should make for a really good collaboration. We both are huge fans of old Hollywood photography. We met for a drink and I brought as many samples of my work as I could carry on my back to show her what I was working on these days, and in the midst of a "bad Christmas sweater" party that arrived at the same time as our meeting at this particular bar, we had a great talk about the work and we're both looking forward to what we might come up with. We have tentative plans to have our first shoot next weekend when I get back.

And in a good example of "never say never," I've started to do some commercial portrait photography. There was a brief period that I used to shoot kids years ago. I would constantly get asked about photographing children, but I think I had so many other photography projects going that I never agreed to do that kind of work with any kind of regularity.

I'd gotten a lot of people asking me about it again this year, and so I decided to give it a try and see how it felt. Photographing children isn't completely unlike shooting models. You still have to create an atmosphere that makes the subject comfortable enough to give your something interesting to photograph. I do spend more time on my stomach to get the angle right though.

One of the reasons I decided to try it again was that it's much easier to deliver the images to the client in a very timely manner. Instantly, for that matter. Back in the day when I was shooting on transparency, there was time getting the film back from the lab and then the clients would have to narrow down their picks over a few days and then give me a few images to take to the lab and have prints made for them. Now, at the end of the session, I burn them a CD of everything and they walk with it.

That works out well for me because it's not as time consuming as it was years ago. And everyone is happy much sooner.

No photographs from LA yet, but there will be plenty of time for that.

More Chicago

I've been continuing to make photographs of Chicago. I have been carrying my camera with me wherever I go now. Here's a new one from yesterday.